Great podcast, I really enjoy how these casts are developer central, critical, objective, and relevant to what’s happening today.

I’ve been having similar discussions surrounding Silverlight. I’m guessing that Silverlight will thrive in the intranet / business application realm, and that Silverlight will take a signifigant bite into the ASP.NET AJAX user base. The ASP.NET AJAX developers (like Silverlight developers) often don’t grock JS, HTML, and the DOM. I think Silverlight offers a less leaky Win Form / Web Form metaphor that will be embraced by these developers.

It’s also interesting to learn that some of the ASP.NET AJAX team (Nikhil at least) is now working (or concurrently working) on Silverlight.

Do you think Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX will co-exist? Or is ASP.NET AJAX already dead?

Adam, that’s the big question isn’t it. If we can do all this snazzy animation and have the power of WPF, essentially running a rich client in the browser, what do we need Javascript + HTML for? I think that there will be some situation where a lighter-weight interface is needed and Silverlight won’t quite work. I’m not familiar with how compatible Silverlight is with accessibility requirements, but I could see HTML being used instead of Silverlight in those cases as well.

Silverlight is just another framework written by people trying to avoid embracing the web. I agree it is just like ActiveX, Flash, Flex, or any other framework that is trying to let people work on the web without understanding how the web works. You will always end up with application that doesn’t feel like it belongs on the web, don’t you hate when you get to a site built in all Flash?

It might be great for the odd movie here or there, like Flash, but I dread the monstrosities people are going to try and build using Silverlight.

John

James, people try to avoid embracing the web because it’s bloody awful. It easily takes three to four times more effort to do things that winforms can do, and all you end up with is an unmaintainable mess. HTML and the GET/POST model was never designed with applications in mind, and it will never suit that purpose in a reasonable timeframe. They’re talking about finalizing HTML 5 “within the next 10 years”. Really. Ten years. Are you kidding me? Plus you have 20 years of backwards compatibility with older HTML you can’t break, blah blah blah yadda yadda, it’s just ridiculous. Give me something that works in a browser and has the ease-of-development of a fat client. Don’t make me fight with an ancient standard that was repurposed 5 times already and hacked to support “applications”.

The sooner HTML/CSS/JS dies the faster we can move forward with sanity.

It’s a hard question, which is why I kind of went back and forth on it. While I’m idealistically more supportive of the semantic HTML approach, I’m very frustrated by the slow progress of the IE team. I don’t want to spend my career programming to the lowest common denominator, any more than I’d want to be writing Access 97 apps for Windows 95 right now. I’m envisioning frameworks like Dojo which require either a modern browser or IE+Silverlight could break that stranglehold a bit.

Re: Silverlight is just another framework…
I agree all these frameworks attempt to accomplish the same thing, turn the web environment into a classical programming environment. This is also why many frameworks fail – the web is not a classical programming environment, we need to unlearn our classic computer science approaches and look at new ways of doing new things. In the end Silverlight could be a less leaky WinForm abstraction, and just another API for programming the web.

@John,
I disagree programming on the web can be faster than WinForm development, but you have to understand the web technologies, embrace the web, and work with the grain.

If it wasn’t obvious from the podcast, I’m with James – on the internets, the web (HTML+CSS) has already won as far as I’m concerned. Silverlight and Flash are great for adding islands of richness, but on the broader web HTML/CSS/Javascript is and will remain king.

The intranet is another story. There, where reach is less important and productivity is more important, I can see Silverlight gaining a foothold.

John

Look, it’s been 20 years, and HTML+CSS STILL doesn’t support column-based layouts without resorting to tables. In my opinion, that’s a huge ball of failure right there. I’m a full time web developer (5 years) and the number of times a day I say “F- this is retarded” only goes up week to week. The very fact you have to roll your own persistence mechanism for any form layout is reason enough to chuck the web.

Of course you can do column based layout with CSS, people do it all the time. Look at some of the grid stuff out there, it’s impressive stuff.

If you really learn and understand the web you will love it, I don’t know anyone who has taken the time and effort to love the simplicity and power of the web that hasn’t grown to love it. If you keep hacking away and try to treat it like a windows application you will never like it.

George

James – show me one site that does columns. Not a page with 3 columns, but a page where you can paste in 1000 words of text, say from a database or just hard into a text area, and have it flowed into 3 pages of three columns each – like a magazine page. Sure, you can use a bunch of asp.net back end or javascript, but why cant a browser just do that? John is right.